Hey, were you planning on buying a next generation console? You might want to hold off until next week, when Valve will finally reveal the Steam Box, as well as its plan for console dominance.

This comes from none other than Gabe Newell, who apparently likes to bury marketing about massive product announcements safely in the middle of massive presentations about Linux. The whole presentation is really only interesting if you’re a total nerd. So here’s all twenty three minutes of it!

Gabe gets into building games, shipping them, and why, precisely, he feels Linux is the future. But there’s a lot more to his statement than just “We’re making a console, guys!”

“Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities that we see for bringing Linux into the living room and potentially pointing further down the road to how we can get it even more unified with mobile.”

I’ve been pounding this drum for a while. A company as forward thinking as Valve has to be wondering what the future is for a PC gaming developer and distributor when increasingly it’s tablets built on Android that are selling the most. Developing for Linux is the first step for that.

Steam For Android is probably not arriving tomorrow. But make no mistake, it’s definitely in the works. And one hopes that Google is paying attention; being able to put Steam Powered on the side of most Android boxes would go a long way towards giving Google the market share, and eyeballs, it wants so much.

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Gabe sings a nice tune but then again Steam does not allow games that have micro transactions (that do not go through the steam store). I’m not saying this is bad, from a business point of view I completely support this and would definitely make the same decision were I in charge of it. Then again feels kind of hypocritical to talk smack about closed system and how a platform blocks competitors from their ecosystem when Steam does the same.

On a less dramatic note, I hope Steambox Linux Skin can be installed in our own HTPCs (dual booting or whatever) not really wanting to buy one more box.